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Firefox Extension Lets You Pick the Name
Rovaedne writes "Mozilla
Firefox , the web browser
formerly known as Firebird,
formerly known as Phoenix, has a new extension which allows you to change the name to something palatable. The extension called
Firesomething lets users change the name seen in the browser titlebar, Help menu, and About dialog, thus erradicating all traces of "Firefox" in
Firefox (currently version 0.8). There is a
name change FAQ, but it currently does not mention this extension. This extension should hopefully help curb some of the criticism that Mozilla has received from its most recent
choice of name."
I heard it is also possible to let it randomly generate a new name everytime you start Firefox, quite funny :)
I have been running Firetoad (and sometimes Firemussel) for 3-4 weeks now.
The plugin was actually released the same day as 0.8.
It hasn't changed 4 times, it's changed twice, and they have been necessary changes to avoid conflicts with other Open Source projects. ;)
Remember, FF is not yet out of Beta so a name change is trivial.
That said, it needs to start building a brand name and that brand will be Firefox. I believe the developers have said clearly that it will not change again.
Anyway, I love the new FF icon. Much nicer than Moz
Actually, that is exactly what I did here in corperate..
Attach the IE icon to it and voila... the users act as if there is no difference except it's massively faster, no popup's, no crashes, no freezes.
It's funny, many people scream about the massive retraining required switching workers to Open Source... It's not real.
With wooden puppets: Thunderbirds are go... dundundeladee.
Or the Triumph Thunderbird motorcycle.
Oooh. Look not a Ford in sight.
In the real world, not necessarily the one you inhabit, the Thunderbird is a mythical beast from native Indian legend.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
I think it was Mister, If I remember correctly :)
Why, you ask?
When I set up a Windows box for a neophyte (admittedly, not often) I do everything I can to purge Internet Exploder from the system. Some might find this unjustifiable, but the only time I'm ever asked (begged) to help Windows is when a friend of my wife's computer is running badly due to six billion viruses and twenty-two trillion Spyware programs.
Anyhow. I hunt down all the shortcuts to IE and file associations to IE (i.e. as a viewer, default browser, blah blah blah) and replace them with Firebird. Then, I swap Firebird's icon with IE's icon. (I do a similar thing with with Lookout Express and ThunderBird). I used to even install the IE theme, but it's been busted for a while.
This will help to complete the illusion.
Of course, when I'm done, I just tell them I put on a new version of "The Internet" called Mozilla to help them not get viruses and spyware in the first place. I make sure they hear the brand at least a dozen times when I'm talking to them, because I want to build brand recognition. Maybe they'll tell their stupid friends how great Mozilla is and their friends will download it and use it. (Wishful thinking, I know).
But we all know that telling a Windows user to use Mozilla Fire* instead of IE will far on deaf ears; these people will click that stupid fuckin' blue E because they want to "get on the Internet". You have to make them use something else, or they WILL succumb to temptation and get infected again.
So far, nobody's come back. Either they hate me now, or they are relatively virus-free; I really don't care which.
At least my daughter was easier to set up. She knows to use Mozilla (full suite) instead of IE/OE. If she truly *needs* to use IE (i.e. one of her favourite sites doesn't work with Moz), she can ask me to add it to IE for her. I do this by modifying the automatic proxy configuration URL -- if it's on my safe site list, it points to Squid; otherwise it points to an inetd->shell hack which tells her to come and see me.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
I have tried to get so many friends to switch over to firefox, and their first reactions were:
1) mozilla ? Their old browsers sucked.
2) firefox ? It sounds like a firewall software.
anyways, after taking the time to explain them what firefox really is, they were all convinced.
This extension is just what we need to make Linux distributions more freindly to Joe User.
Whenever you get a Linux distribution, it insalls about 5 differeent web browsers with confusing names such as Konqueror, Mozilla, Lynx, Galeon and Epiphany. There is no need for all those web browsers. And don't scream CHOICE either, you are only going to be using ONE, so why have 5 installed?
This is where this extension comes in. Linux distributions could now just ship one browser, but customised with their experiance. Imagine Debianavigator, Fedora the explorer, SuSEscape, Webdrake, Genfox and Slackzilla web browsers, with their own themeing, but still firefox internally, and "hardcore" users could still change it back if they wanted by downloading the extention.
Lindows already ship a customised Mozilla known as "Lindows Internet Suite", so why can't other Linux distributions do this? They already brand KDE/GNOME/ETC with their menu layouts, icons and apps, so why not do web browsers?
This plug-in is kinda funny, and I hope the Mozilla folks can take a joke and enjoy the laugh. But treating "the criticism that Mozilla has received from its most recent choice of name" as if it were a serious issue suggests that the submitter of this article could stand to lighten up and look around. The vast majority of Browser Formerly Known As users seem to have taken to the the name "Firefox" pretty well. As the album cover says: 205,000 Google hits for "firefox browser" can't be wrong.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
would help those running pokerbots for the online poker sites... currently, the largest online poker site is blocking a bot program by not letting you log in (or kicking you off) by scanning for a window with the program name in the title. You can even go to the program's home page, and because the title bar switches, it will kill it.
If I acutally wanted to USE this bot, it would be pretty trivial to hack it's resources to change the titlebar (actually, I'm sure the author has already randomized the title). We're going to see an increasing battle between 'bot programs for online gambling and those who run online gambling sites.
If you're curious, to a google groups search on rec.gambling.poker for "WinHoldEm"
DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
Good point. It's worth noting that even Mozillatips recommend keeping IE around for Windows Updates and also certain poorly-designed-but-necessary sites, like certain banks.
Incidentally, I keep IE as my 2nd browser at work for testing, and also to use the control panel app on a Cobalt Raq box. Irony, eh?
This is where the serious fun begins.
The Mozilla crowd should take a page from Microsoft's book and rename it to "Web Browser (tm)".
Will Firefox ever fix the lack of DDE support?
For example, I can communicate with mozilla with a command such as:
Link.LinkTopic = "Mozilla|WWW_GetWindowInfo"
Link.LinkMode = 2
Link.LinkRequest
I can grab all sort of nice information through this process. Netscape, Opera, IE -- all support this function. Firefox currenly does not.
If plug-ins like the one described in the original posting change the DDE information, then it will even be more complicated to develop applications that are compatable with this browser.
Davak
No, except on massively slow machines (<= 300 MHz), I've definitely found Firefox to be much snappier at page rendering than Internet Explorer. You might be having some trouble if you're using extensions that slow the browser to a crawl, like Tabbrowser Extensions, but I've found that a vanilla Firefox is much faster than IE, especially on faster machines, at rendering everything but heavy (1000+ row) dynamically-sized tables and shitty AOL Hometown pages with 300 animated GIFs running at once.
Considering that the Mozilla org is being quite stingy with the Firefox trademark -- you're not supposed to use the icons or name except for the "official" builds -- this is actually really useful.
It's come up as an issue with the Debian package for Firefox.
Evan Prodromou | evan@prodromou.name | http://evan.prodromou.name/
I only discovered this recently so i'm not sure how far back it goes (Im running KDE3.2)
...
...
many Kde applications can be started to display a different name. For example, if you were feeling particularly sadistic you could run konqueror like this
%> konqueror --caption "Internet Explorer"
although something like
%> juk --caption "iTunes"
is probably more palatable
nick
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp